Search form

TRENDING:

FEATURED:

House GOP leaders are stalling on the highway bill in order to eliminate jobs and damage President Obama’s reelection chances, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) charged on Thursday.

The Senate in March easily passed bipartisan legislation reauthorizing transportation spending for two years, but conservatives objected to the size of package, leading House GOP leaders to champion a short-term extension instead.

Pelosi, the Democratic leader, suggested Thursday that the smaller proposal is part of a broader GOP strategy to delay the transportation funding so it won't stimulate the economy before November.

ADVERTISEMENT

"Why would they not bring it up?" Pelosi said during her weekly press briefing in the Capitol. "Because I think that the Republicans in the House want to do nothing more than having extensions. Maybe they'll do something right before the election, but it'll be too late to create jobs.

"If they do the extensions," she added, "they're using up the trust fund, the highway trust fund, they are hurting job creation — in fact people will lose jobs — and it's just the wrong thing to do."

“Rather than making up stories that have no basis in reality, Leader Reid should follow the House’s example and focus on pro-growth measures that will get the economy going and get people back to work,” Cantor spokeswoman Laena Fallon said.

Adding to urgency of the debate, the private sector hired only 82,000 new workers in May, the Labor Department reported last week. Combined with the 13,000 public sector jobs that were lost, the economy created only 69,000 for the month — the lowest figure in a year, and far fewer than analysts had predicted.

Many of the job losses came in the construction industry, fueling the Democrats' push for to pass a highway bill quickly.

"It would take us 15 minutes to pass the transportation bill, putting those people back to work," Pelosi said. "This is irresponsible, it's immature and it's unfair to America's workers."